Daniel Chee Tsui

Tsui, Daniel Chee, 1938–, Chinese-American physicist, b. Henan, China, Ph.D. Univ. of Chicago, 1967. He was a member of the technical staff at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., from 1968 to 1982, when he joined the faculty at Princeton. Tsui and Horst Störmer were co-recipients, with Robert Laughlin, of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics. They discovered that electrons acting together in strong magnetic fields can form new types of quasiparticles that have just a fraction of the electrical charge an electron is supposed to have. Tsui and Störmer observed the phenomenon, which is now known as the fractional quantum Hall effect, in their laboratory in 1982, and Laughlin later provided the theoretical explanation for it.